Detail pictures of the motherboard
The board is based on Intel Z77 chipset and Support for Intel® Core™ i7 processors/Intel® Core™ i5 processors/ Intel® Core™ i3 processors/Intel® Pentium® processors/Intel® Celeron® processors in the LGA1155 package. It supports 4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 32 GB of system memory (dual memory architecture).
There are 3 full length PCIe 3.0 slots 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16). When two slots are used, it runs in x8 + x8. PCIEX4 runs in X4 and is available only when an Intel 22nm (Ivy Bridge) CPU is installed.
* The PCIEX4 slot shares bandwidth with the PCIEX8 and PCIEX16 slots. When the PCIEX4 slot is populated, the PCIEX16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode and the PCIEX8 will operate at up to x4 mode. (The PCIEX16, PCIEX8, and PCIEX4 slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard.) * Whether PCI Express 3.0 is supported depends on CPU and graphics card compatibility. The slots support support AMD CrossFireX™ / NVIDIA SLI technology
There are 3 x PCI Express x1 slots (All PCI Express x1 slots conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.) and 1 x PCI slot. At the centre of the motherboard is the mSATA port for Intel Smart Response technology.
On the back of top left of the motherboard, we can see the 1394 port, VIA controller chipset. the audio codec, GbE chipset.
The Thunderbolt chipset Intel DSL3510L chip supports 2 Thunderbolt ports on the back panel (Intel® Certified Thunderbolt™ Device).
The 4 DIMM slots , debug LED, 24 pin power connector. Just next to the Power botton is the voltage read out points. The Clear CMOS and RESET switch is on the right hand side.
Over here we see the SATA connectors. Some of it are supported by chipset while the rest are via marvell 88SE9172 chipset.
Chipset:
2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3 0/SATA3 1) supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices
4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2 2~5) supporting up to 4 SATA 3Gb/s devices
1 x mSATA connector
* The SATA2 5 connector will become unavailable when the mSATA connector is installed with a solid state drive.
Support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10
* When a RAID set is built across the SATA 6Gb/s and SATA 3Gb/s channels, the system performance of the RAID set may vary depending on the devices being connected.
Marvell 88SE9172 chip:
1 x SATA 6Gb/s connector (GSATA3 8) supporting up to 1 SATA 6Gb/s device
1 x eSATA 6Gb/s connector on the back panel supporting up to 1 SATA 6Gb/s device
Support for RAID 0 and RAID 1
On the backplane, we see the D-SUB, HDMI, DVI-D USB 3.0, USB 2.0, eSATA,GbE, 2 x Thunderbolt port and audio ports.
USB Chipset:
Up to 2 USB 3.0/2.0 ports (available through the internal USB headers)
Up to 6 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (2 ports on the back panel, 4 ports available through the internal USB headers)
Chipset + 2 VIA VL810 Hubs:
Up to 8 USB 3.0/2.0 ports (4 ports on the back panel, 4 ports available through the internal USB headers)
* In Windows XP, the Intel USB 3.0 ports and VIA VL810 HUB can support up to USB 2.0 transfer speed.
* Due to a Windows 7 limitation, please connect your USB device(s) to the USB 2.0/1.1 port(s) before the Intel USB 3.0 controller driver is installed.
